World's biggest auto show ends on a sour note

NEW DELHI: It is the world's biggest automobile show in terms of footfalls- visited this year by an estimated 2 million people. The participation cost here is higher than even the Frankfurt Motor Show. But if these facts suggest that the Delhi Auto Expo, which ended on Monday, was a roaring success, nothing could be further from the truth.

Most participating companies and visitors said that poor facilities, bad crowd management and lack of coordination among multiple organisers had robbed the event of its five-star billing.

"It has been an agonising experience for us to participate at the Delhi Auto Expo. But the Indian car market is so important that we had no option but to make do with the poor infrastructure provided to us,'' said a senior official of a Japanese car company, on condition of anonymity.

The sentiment was shared by senior officials of many other companies. Many of them said they were "nearly squeezed' ' within stalls and had to cope with swarms of people, with fears of a stampede looming large all the time. "The organisers seem to have sold each and every square inch within the pavilions and there was hardly any space for people to walk. We had to provide some space from our own pavilion so there was some breathing space,'' a company official said.

The scale of the show, that seems to be rising with the growth of the auto industry, seems to be becoming a major problem for the organisers - the Confederation of Indian Industry, Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers and Automotive Component Manufacturers Association.

Companies also complained that basic facilities like clean toilets were missing , forcing them to hire mobile toilets for their staff. Some manufacturers said their CEOs and MDs had to slug it out in long queues as there was no proper arrangement for them to enter the venue. "And this despite our paying such exorbitant fee to the organisers ,'' an official of a German company said.

As many as 2 million people are believed to have visited the show this time, two lakh more than the official figures recorded at the last expo two years ago.

Poor crowd management was evident at pavilions like that of Tata Motors and also at halls housing German companies like BMW and Audi. Instead of a one-way passage, a common alley was left for people to walk to and fro, leading to pushing and jostling.

CII director-general Chandrajit Banerjee said, "We tried our best, but the infrastructure is inadequate to hold a world-class show of this magnitude .'' However, he denied that there was a lack of coordination between the three organisers of the show.